John W. Sharp on eHealth and Health IT

Salud 2.0 is simply Health 2.0 in Spanish. This conference brings together speakers to discuss Web 2.0 technologies in health care. My presentation was Social Media in Health Care: A Reasoned Approach.

I received several questions and will repeat them here to give more complete answers:

What to you mean about the risk of conflict of interest?
Because social media is largely brief communication, a physician or other healthcare professional could promote a product or service without a disclaimer that they have a financial interest in this product. To be transparent about potential conflicts of interest in social media, one must add a link to a webpage with full disclosure. Drug and device companies must be clear about any claims they make on social media and should link to more complete information.

There are so many social media outlets, how do you choose where to start?
Find the best tool for what you need. It is not necessary to use multiple social media tools. For instance, if you are a physician or healthcare professional and want to communicate with colleagues, use Twitter if you are comfortable with more open communications, use a private social network for your group only if you would rather keep private. If you are a hospital and want to interact with patients, consider Facebook because it is an open, widely used platform which allows comments from patients.

In Spain there is a publicly supported healthcare system, unlike the US. How should the approach to social media be different?
I would think hospitals would still want to hear from patients but would not use social media as a means to attract new patients unless there was a specialty service that more patients should be made aware of. A good example of this is http://www.guiametabolica.org/ which is also being presented at the conference. Social media could also have more of a public health approach – how to keep the population healthier and identify diseases earlier for intervention.